Hotels and Covid-19

Read the key messages from the study and download the PDF for all the insights

• Tourism, whose lynchpin is still largely represented by hotel facilities, is an important driving force for most of the world’s economies.
• We are talking about 10% of world GDP, which in the case of Italy rises to 13%.
• In the last five years in Italy, the flow of foreign tourists has grown in particular, accounting in 2019 for more than half of the total number of visits, at over 400 million people.
• The Italian accommodation capacity, characterised by a large number of small non-hotel facilities, however, continues to count on the attractiveness of the hotels that hosted 65% of tourists in 2019.
• There are about 33,000 hotels, mostly small and independent, offering over a million rooms, the highest number in Europe.
• Tourism is strongly linked to the mobility of people and, for this very reason, is one of the sectors most affected by the crisis caused by the spread of Covid-19.
• The latest estimates speak of tourist flows of 180 million lost between January and April 2020, -44% compared to the same period in 2019. In the worst case scenario, more than 1 billion tourists and almost 200 million jobs will be lost in 2020.
• In Italy, a 44% reduction in tourism flows is expected in 2020, mainly due to the drastic reduction in international tourism. For hotels, a loss in turnover is estimated at around 50%.
• In order to face this unprecedented crisis, the hotel industry will have to rethink, both in terms of organisational modes to respond to the new needs of distancing, and in terms of communication modes to restore the climate of trust that could allow tourists to resume travel.
• The hotels’ ability to strengthen their level of digitalisation will also be crucial to ensure that they are more resilient in a changing environment.
• The changes that have affected hotels in the last decade have seen them become real places of aggregation and cohesion of the productive and social fabric of the territories.
• Supporting their reopening will mean strengthening a fundamental flywheel for the whole of Italy.